Japan's largest business daily Nikkei said that the Nexus 7 is taking over mainly because of price

Apple's iPad is notorious for being king of the tablets, but in Japan, this may no longer be the case.

Market research firm BCN conducted a survey in Japan last December to see what the tablet market share was looking like. Out of 2,400 consumer electronics stores in Japan, the iPad had 40.1 percent of the market while Google's Nexus 7 claimed 44.4 percent.

Japan's largest business daily Nikkei said that the Nexus 7 is taking over mainly because of price. The Nexus 7 costs $199 USD while the cheapest iPad -- the iPad mini -- is $329 USD. Both the Nexus 7 and iPad mini are 7-inch tablets.

However, the report did note that some stores in Japan have run out of the iPad mini, which may have affected the results a bit.

Google's Nexus 7 is a tablet made by ASUS. It runs the latest version of the Android operating system, 4.1 Jelly Bean, and packs various features like a 7-inch IPS display with a 1280x800 resolution, a quad-core NVIDIA Tegra 3 processor, a 1.2 MP front-facing camera, NFC, Bluetooth, 802.11n wireless, GPS and 16GB/32GB versions. The 16GB version starts at $199 while the 32GB runs $249.99.

1. Piracy on iOS mainly exists on jailbroken devices, a small percentage of iOS users. Sideloading pirated applications is possible on pretty much every single Android device out there. The piracy statistics on Android are massive, there is no comparison.

2. Supporting numerous hardware and OS configurations remains a huge concern for mobile developers. It is an additional cost of support for a less profitable ecosystem, furthering the vicious cycle of lower quality applications that it gets.

It is even worse through non-official channels. There's a reason why anti-malware software is even a thing on Android.

4) There are loads of free and ad-supported applications on iOS as well. The difference is that again, they are higher quality apps because that's where most of the high end and paying users are. Those ads get more eyeballs, even Google makes more money from iOS traffic than they do from Android, and people are more likely to spend on microtransactions.

Developers go where the money is.

5. I don't know a single mobile developer who likes the Android SDK over iOS. WP7/8 is actually the most preferred, but unfortunately its low userbase doesn't help it get as many apps as it should.

6. No enforcement of proper tablet UI standards is a weakness. Andy Rubin believes that upscaling a phone UI works just fine, which is nonsense and does a disservice to the user. Would you rather have a single column phone app expanded on a 10" tablet or something with two or three panes that takes advantage of the space? It doesn't make any sense to take a smartphone UI and think it is acceptable when you have so much more real estate on a tablet.

People see the difference in Android and iOS tablet apps and make a decision. This attitude doesn't help Android tablet sales or customers in the slightest.